Bizarro World

Does this sound like anything you've ever been told could be called "justice"?

Two weeks ago, a pair of F.B.I. agents appeared unannounced at the door of a member of the defense team for one of the men accused of plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As a contractor working with the defense team at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the man was bound by the same confidentiality rules as a lawyer. But the agents wanted to talk. 

They asked questions, lawyers say, about the legal teams for Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other accused terrorists who will eventually stand trial before a military tribunal at Guantánamo. Before they left, the agents asked the contractor to sign an agreement promising not to tell anyone about the conversation. 

With that signature, Mr. bin al-Shibh’s lawyers say, the government turned a member of their team into an F.B.I. informant.

Also too, is this ok?

Last year, as a lawyer for Mr. Mohammed was speaking during another hearing, a red light began flashing. Then the videofeed from the courtroom abruptly cut out. The emergency censorship system had been activated. But why? And by whom? The defense lawyer had said nothing classified. And the court officer responsible for protecting state secrets had not triggered the system. Days later, the military judge, Col. James L. Pohl, announced that he had been told that an “original classification authority” — meaning the C.I.A. — was secretly monitoring the proceedings. Unknown to everyone else, the agency had its own button, which the judge swiftly and angrily disconnected.

Last year, the government acknowledged that microphones were hidden inside what looked like smoke detectors in the rooms where detainees met with their lawyers. Those microphones gave officials the ability to eavesdrop on confidential conversations, but the military said it never did so.

There's a term for this:

A kangaroo court is a judicial tribunal or assembly that blatantly disregards recognized standards of law or justice, and often carries little or no official standing in the territory within which it resides. Merriam-Webster defines it as "a mock court in which the principles of law and justice are disregarded or perverted". 

A kangaroo court is often held by a group or a community to give the appearance of a fair and just trial, even though the verdict has in reality already been decided before the trial has begun. Such courts typically take place in rural areas where legitimate law enforcement may be limited. The term may also apply to a court held by a legitimate judicial authority who intentionally disregards the court's legal or ethical obligations.

This is why I laugh when people say we need to "trust" the secret intelligence agencies and accept that they are following the rule of law and the constitution. It's probably the most fatuous remark I ever hear from liberals. According to that way of thinking, it's the people who reveal the government's misdeeds, not the misdeeds themselves, that constitutes betrayal of our country. I think that may be just a tiny misunderstanding of the issue.

Digby, Hullabaloo|  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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The Inside Story Of Nirvana's One-Night-Only Reunion

[ed. I like the image of Krist Novoselic picking up a Nirvana songbook to re-learn his own songs.]

The thought of entering the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his work in Nirvana barely even entered Dave Grohl's head until shortly after he walked offstage at last year's ceremony in Los Angeles after inducting Rush and jamming with them on "2112." "I did a quick interview and someone said, 'Are you excited to be eligible next year?'" Grohl says. "I just hadn't done the math. Then it hit me. But I couldn't imagine they would nominate us in our first year of eligibility."

Groups are eligible to enter the Hall of Fame 25 years after the release of their first album or single, and Nirvana's debut release - a cover of "Love Buzz" by Shocking Blue - hit shelves in the final weeks of 1988. "I found out we were on the ballot right around the same time we were nominated for a Grammy [for the Paul McCartney collaboration "Cut Me Some Slack,"] says Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic. "I was just like, 'Wow!' But it was bittersweet because the ceremony was scheduled for about a week after the 20th anniversary of Kurt's passing. I got anxious about that, but then I thought, 'Well, why don't we just make this a great tribute to him?'"

Most groups inducted into the Hall of Fame perform in one form or another, but the surviving members of the group hadn't played a Nirvana song in public since Cobain's death. "We didn't even start talking about playing until about eight weeks ago," says Grohl. "It just seemed practically impossible. It was hard to imagine jumping onstage and playing those songs. It takes a little bit of musical preparation, and a lot of emotional preparation."

Once they decided to give it a shot, the obvious next issue became finding guest singers. "That was a matter of finding people that we respected and that shared the Nirvana aesthetic," says Grohl. "Whether that's musical or otherwise." The group reached out to a handful of A-list male rock stars, but none wanted to take on the challenge. "Some of them were nervous," says Grohl. "I think some of them were maybe apprehensive because of how heavy the whole thing is."

The first person to agree was Joan Jett. "She took it on like it was her calling," says Grohl. "She got really excited and sent me this flurry of e-mails. She learned every song on Nevermind. She's everything that Nirvana stood for. She's a powerful, rebellious, musical force of nature. We couldn't think of anyone better to join us."  (...)

But the conversation gave Grohl an incredible idea. "We thought, 'Wait, it has to be all women,'" he says. "'Don't even ask anyone else. If we can fill the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame performance with these incredible women singing Nirvana songs, then we'll have achieved our own revolution.' It also added a whole other dimension to the show. It added substance and depth, so it didn't turn into a eulogy. It was more about the future."

Things moved very quickly from there. "Dave just started rattling off names," says Novoselic. "He was like, 'We should get Kim Gordon! And then someone up-and-coming…Annie Clark from St. Vincent!' I didn't even know who she was, but now I'm her biggest fan. Then we asked Lorde."

The goal was to present the guest singers in chronological order. "Joan Jett, who formed the Runaways, changed rock & roll for women," says Grohl. "Kim Gordon, from Sonic Youth, was this beacon of light in the predominantly macho, male underground punk rock scene. St. Vincent is a wicked musician that's pushing boundaries now. And Lorde has an incredible future ahead of her as a writer, performer and vocalist."

The group came together with Nirvana's former touring guitarist (and current Foo Fighter) Pat Smear at Gibson Guitar's rehearsal space in New York City a few days before the induction ceremony. "We said 'Hi' to everyone and launched into 'Lithium,'" says Novoselic. "I picked up a Nirvana tab book a week before to re-learn my parts, but we weren't up to speed at first. But then it started to flow and it got better and better. Then it hit me and I got kind of somber. I was like, 'Oh my God. I'm playing these songs again.'"

It was equally intense for Grohl. "The first time we played together, it was like seeing a ghost," he says. "The second time, it was a little more reserved. And the last time we played it was like that fucking Demi Moore/Patrick Swayze pottery wheel scene from Ghost. We usually got the song by the third take. It started to sound like Nirvana. Our road crew and some friends were in the room when we launched into 'Scentless Apprentice' for the first time. There were jaws on the floor.

by Andy Greene, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Aereo Case Will Shape TV’s Future

Throughout America’s business history, the victories and spoils went to the visionaries who made all manner of things — actual things like cars, pharmaceuticals and entertainment.

But more and more, many of the splashy business victories are going to companies that find a way to put a new skin on things that already exist. Uber does not own a single cab, yet it has upended the taxi industry. Airbnb doesn’t possess real estate, yet it has become a huge player in the lodging market. WhatsApp remapped texting on existing telecommunications infrastructure and — thanks to its acquisition by Facebook — has as much as $19 billion to show for it. The list goes on, but you get the idea.

Since 2012, Chet Kanojia has been building a business, backed by the media mogul Barry Diller, with ambitions to join that cohort. His start-up, Aereo, uses tiny remote antennas to capture broadcast TV signals and store them in the cloud, where consumers can watch them on a device of their choosing — no cable box, no cable bundle and most important, no expensive cable bill.

Instead, consumers pay $8 to $12 a month to watch almost live — there is a delay of a few seconds — and recorded programs from the major broadcast networks and public television. It’s a threat to both the lucrative cable bundle and the networks that receive rich fees for being part of that cable package. Aereo would give so-called cord cutters the means to assemble a more affordable package of online streaming options like Amazon Prime, Apple TV or Netflix, and still spend a Sunday afternoon watching the N.F.L. and “60 Minutes” immediately afterward. As antenna-driven viewing has dropped and digital consumption has surged, Aereo is a way to put old wine in a new bottle.

It is a crafty workaround to existing regulations, which rides on the Cablevision court ruling in 2008, which held that consumers had the right, through their cable boxes, to record programming. But then, cable companies pay broadcasters billions in so-called retransmission fees while Aereo pays them exactly nothing. (And the case is not just about Aereo — it opens the gate for cable companies or others to build a similar service and skip the billions in payments to the networks.)

The broadcast networks have a technical legal term for this particular innovation — theft — and they have been trying to shut down Aereo from the start.

It all collides on Tuesday, when the Supreme Court will hear the case American Broadcasting Companies v. Aereo. It will be up to the court to decide whether the service is a consumer-friendly reskinning of the broadcast universe or just one more example of an Internet pirate trying to loot copyrighted content. In some senses, the case is as big of a deal as the Betamax ruling in 1984, which allowed consumers to record programming.

“This is the Sony Betamax of this century,” Mr. Kanojia said on the phone last week, citing a case that is likely to come up a lot on Tuesday.

The entertainment industry hated the Betamax decision and said it would lead to ruin — it didn’t — and the networks are just as opposed to a federal appeals court ruling last year to let what they see as Aereo’s chronic, classic infringement continue. In the broadcasters’ brief asking the Supreme Court to reverse that decision, Aereo was described as “an entire business model premised on massive and unauthorized commercial exploitation of copyrighted works.”

As a matter of copyright law, television programs can be shown only by those who have that right or a license to do so. That’s why bars and hotels must pay a fee for the programming they show on their televisions. And broadcasters say that Aereo is similarly a middleman that should pay for what they consider a public performance.

Aereo was conceived in the belief that because the consumer is the one who is pushing the button to watch live or recorded programming, that transaction is one-to-one and not a public performance. That the DVR is in the cloud and the antenna is remote is, in Aereo’s view, beside the point. In its arguments, Aereo embraces both the past (consumers have been using VCRs and then DVRs to record programming for decades) and the future (everything from Dropbox to Google Drive lets the consumer store what he wishes without any liability on the provider’s part). (...)

I spent time in Hollywood last week chatting with various executives, and Aereo was described variously as “a fencing operation peddling stolen goods” and “thieves masquerading as innovators.” That’s about as friendly as it got: Aereo may be small — Mr. Diller called it “a pimple” — but it represents something mighty important. If Aereo is allowed to store and transmit signals without payment, the television industry will be profoundly reconfigured.

by David Carr, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: G. Giraldo

#Love: I’m Single, Therefore I Tinder

In the game of Tinder, you win or you get bored and give up. That is pretty much standard operating procedure for anyone with a smartphone and a libido.

But what if you’re bad at Tinder?

Naturally, I can’t solve all your problems. But experts from across the country, as well as Tinder’s own Sean Rad, have hooked us up with some solid advice.

Tinder represents a new phase in the era of online dating. At one point, the only real online dating options were eHarmony and Match.com, and their rich, divorced customers were usually looking for something more serious. Then came OkCupid, asking you to browse photos in the cold blue light of your computer.

Now, we’re in the age of Tinder. The Tinder Years. Not only is the app free, but it tries its best to mimic the experience of perusing hotties in a bar, as opposed to surfing pictures on the web like a creep. And that’s the dream, right? To look across a crowded room and see eyes glaring back at you, silently undressing you until numbers are exchanged, and then saliva, and then maybe some token of trust and monogamy. Perhaps, a smartphone password (just kidding).

Tinder wants badly for that to be your experience on the app, which is why it’s an app in the first place. Rather than use it in the cold blue light of your computer screen on lonely nights, the app travels around town with you in your pocket. You may very well be on Tinder, digitally flirting in a bar, while you are actually at a bar. Yet despite their similar characteristics, the two experiences are very different.

The Game

Tinder is far more similar to Candy Crush than it is to flirting in a bar or even using OkCupid. It is a game centered around attraction. You swipe right if you like what you see, and swipe left if you don’t. And, if you prefer, that can be the entire experience.

Waiting for an elevator, or growing bored of your friends’ conversation hanging out, you tap on that little orange flame and sink some time. Left, left, left, right, left. Your thumbs do their own military march to the rhythm of your unending judgement. If you’re lucky, you have some new messages. You are, more than anything, entertained. You are not engaged.

But most of us don’t download Tinder with the hopes of adding a new, judgement-filled game to our smartphones. We download Tinder with the intention to engage with other humans, and all of us with different end goals.

So how do you, as a user, transform Tinder from “playing a game” to “I got game”?

The most prominent answer is that you don’t. To win at Tinder (or, to Winder, if you will) is to first accept that Tinder is a game. Hell, the app even tells you to “keep playing” after every match. It’s a great game. A game you can win.

Once you’ve let go of the idea that your soulmate is one swipe away, you may actually stand a chance at finding him or her. Tinder claims to have received emails on over 1,000 engagements from couples who met on the app, with the app approaching 1.5 billion matches. The founder of the app met his current girlfriend there. The odds are ever in your favor.

Now, you must understand the rules.

With Tinder, there are four important parts of the game to focus on: Pictures, Bio, Messaging, and Timing.

by Jordan Crook, TechCrunch |  Read more:

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Palcohol

Name: Palcohol.

Age: Weeks old, regulation-wise.

Appearance: Illicit-looking white powder.

Is it illicit? Not at all. In fact it's been approved for sale by the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau.

And what is it, exactly? It's powderised alcohol.

Come again? It's alcohol in powder form. Just add water.

You mean it turns water into wine? It turns water into either vodka or rum, or optional flavours including cosmopolitan, mojito and the Powderita – a powdered margarita.

Move over, Jesus! There's a new miracle worker in town! There is indeed: Mark Phillips, inventor of Palcohol.

Tell me more about him. "Mark is an active guy," according to the Palcohol website. "After hours of an activity, he sometimes wanted to relax and enjoy a refreshing adult beverage."

You know who Mark reminds me of? Me! Mark didn't want to carry bulky bottles of alcohol on his activities, so he invented Palcohol. But it has loads of other handy applications.

Really? I can't think of any. What about adding it to food for an extra kick?

Rum on your cornflakes? The Palcohol website suggested vodka on eggs, but it's the same idea – drinking at breakfast "to start your day off right".

Great thinking! What other advice does the website have? It suggested taking Palcohol into expensive venues to jazz up soft drinks, and mentioned "the elephant in the room".

by The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Chris Collins/Corbis

Alive in the Sunshine

For as long as the environment has existed, it’s been in crisis. Nature has always been a focus of human thought and action, of course, but it wasn’t until pesticides and pollution started clouding the horizon that something called “the environment” emerged as a matter of public concern.

In 1960s and 1970s America, dystopian images provoked anxiety about the costs of unprecedented prosperity: smog thick enough to hide skylines from view, waste seeping into suburban backyards, rivers so polluted they burst into flames, cars lined up at gas stations amid shortages, chemical weapons that could defoliate entire forests. Economists and ecologists alike forecasted doom, warning that humanity was running up against natural limits to growth, extinction crises, and population explosions.

But the apocalypse didn’t happen. The threat that the environment seemingly posed to economic growth and human well-being faded from view; relieved to have vanquished the environmental foe, many rushed to declare themselves its friends instead.

Four decades later, everyone’s an environmentalist — and yet the environment appears to be in worse shape than ever. The problems of the seventies are back with a vengeance, often transposed into new landscapes, and new ones have joined them. Species we hardly knew existed are dying off en masse; oceans are acidifying in what sounds like the plot of a second-rate horror movie; numerous fisheries have collapsed or are on the brink; freshwater supplies are scarce in regions home to half the world’s population; agricultural land is exhausted of nutrients; forests are being leveled at staggering rates; and, of course, climate change looms over all.

These aren’t issues that can be fixed by slapping a filter on a smokestack. They’re certainly not about hugging trees or hating people. To put it bluntly, we’re confronted with the fact that human activity has transformed the entire planet in ways that are now threatening the way we inhabit it — some of us far more than others. And it’s not particularly helpful to talk in generalities: the idea that The Environment is some entity that can be fixed with A Solution is part of the problem.

The category “environmental problems” contains multitudes, and their solutions don’t always line up: water shortages in Phoenix are a different matter than air pollution in Los Angeles, disappearing wetlands in Louisiana, or growing accumulations of atmospheric carbon. So instead of laying out some kind of template for a sustainable future, I argue that there’s no way to get there without tackling environmentalism’s old stumbling blocks: consumption and jobs. And the way to do that is through a universal basic income. (...)

It’s hard to think of many things more disingenuous than arguing that addressing environmental issues will impose unacceptable restrictions on the American standard of living while simultaneously promoting austerity measures — yet that attitude is pervasive in mainstream political discourse.

And while having stuff doesn’t make you a miserable soulless materialist, as some of the shriller anti-consumerist rhetoric would suggest, it doesn’t necessarily make you happier, either. Rather, the “status treadmill” frequently does the opposite: fueling anxiety, inadequacy, and debt under the banner of democracy and freedom. Meanwhile, consumer guilt has led to an explosion in “green” products — recycled toilet paper, organic T-shirts, all-natural detergents — but most do little more than greenwash the same old stuff, bestowing a sheen of virtue on their users, suggesting personal choices will save the planet. But the individual agonizing that constitutes consumer politics isn’t going to get around the fact that the global economy depends on more or less indefinitely expanding consumption. In fact, consumption has come full circle and become virtuous: protesting sweatshops and ranting about exploitation is passé; buying gadgets is the new way to lift people out of poverty. And so it’s not just workers who are threatened with jobs blackmail — we’re all threatened with consumption blackmail, wherein consuming less will put millions out of work worldwide and crash the global economy. Even our trash is creating jobs somewhere. (...)

A “green economy” can’t just be one that makes “green” versions of the same stuff, or one that makes solar panels in addition to SUVs. Eco-Keynesianism in the form of public works projects can be temporarily helpful in building light rail systems and efficient infrastructure, weatherizing homes, and restoring ecosystems — and to be sure, there’s a lot of work to be done in those areas. But a spike in green jobs doesn’t tell us much about how to provide for everyone without creating jobs by perpetually expanding production. The problem isn’t that every detail of the green-jobs economy isn’t laid out in full — calls for green jobs are meant to recognize the fraught history of labor-environmentalist relations, and to signify a commitment to ensuring that sustainability doesn’t come at the expense of working communities. The problem is that the vision they call forth isn’t a projection of the future so much as a reflection of the past — most visions of a “new economy” look a whole lot like the same old one. Such visions reveal a hope that climate change will be our generation’s New Deal or World War II, vaulting us out of hard times into a new era of widespread prosperity.

by Alyssa Battistoni, Jacobin |  Read more:

Image: Edward Carvalho-Monaghan

In a Hole, Golf Considers Digging a Wider One

Golf holes the size of pizzas. Soccer balls on the back nine. A mulligan on every hole.

These are some of the measures — some would say gimmicks — that golf courses across the country have experimented with to stop people from quitting the game.

Golf has always reveled in its standards and rich tradition. But increasingly a victim of its own image and hidebound ways, golf has lost five million players in the last decade, according to the National Golf Foundation, with 20 percent of the existing 25 million golfers apt to quit in the next few years.

People under 35 have especially spurned the game, saying it takes too long to play, is too difficult to learn and has too many tiresome rules.

Many of golf’s leaders are so convinced the sport is in danger of following the baby boomer generation into the grave that an internal rebellion has led to alternative forms of golf with new equipment, new rules and radical changes to courses. The goal is to alter the game’s reputation in order to recruit lapsed golfers and a younger demographic.

“We’ve got to stop scaring people away from golf by telling them that there is only one way to play the game and it includes these specific guidelines,” said Ted Bishop, the president of the P.G.A. of America, who also owns a large Indiana golf complex. “We’ve got to offer more forms of golf for people to try. We have to do something to get them into the fold, and then maybe they’ll have this idea it’s supposed to be fun.”

Among the unconventional types of golf is an entry-level version in which the holes are 15 inches wide, about four times the width of a standard hole.

by Bill Pennington, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Paul Abell/Associated Press for Hack Golf

Arne Svenson, “Neighbors #5,” 2012
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Gustavo Minas
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My Boss Has Body Odour and I Have Sex with My Twin

In the late 17th century, a “panel of experts” answered reader queries submitted to the The Athenian Mercury, on topics ranging from literature to epistemology; the magazine’s spin-off, The Ladies Mercury, was devoted solely to advising “virgins, wives, or widows.” A hundred years later, the Ladies Monthly Museum, a periodical devoted to the “Amusement and Instruction” of polite females, would provide what’s probably the template for the contemporary advice column. Since then, “agony aunts” (and “uncles”) have become staples across media—print (Ann Landers, Dear Abby, Dan Savage), radio (Dr. Drew), online (Cary Tennis)—and the most distinctive voices among them have become iconic.

But why do complete strangers seek advice from people they hardly know? And likewise, how do advice columnists—who are rarely psychologists or ethicists by training—justify their answers?

Hazlitt recently gathered four of our favourite columnists for a round of shoptalk on the ethics and challenges of the advice game. Cheryl Strayed, otherwise known as ‘Dear Sugar’ at The Rumpus, has published two books this year: the New York Times bestseller Wild, a heartrending memoir about her arduous solo trek along the Pacific Crest Trail in the wake of a marriage break-up and her mother’s death; and a collection of her ‘Dear Sugar’ columns titled Tiny Beautiful Things. Cary Tennis writes the ‘Since You Asked’ column at Salon, where his existential musings have offered comfort to readers since 2001. Emily Yoffe is Slate’s ‘Dear Prudence’, while her other writing has appeared in the New York Times and Esquire. Lynn Coady is a former advice columnist for The Globe and Mail and her novel, The Antagonist, was shortlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize.

Are there common threads or themes that you see over and over in the questions you get? Questions that seem to be real problems in a lot of people’s lives that they keep writing in about in variations?

Cheryl: Yes, a ton. There are a lot of people with broken hearts. And they’ll never get over so and so leaving them.

Emily: Yeah, I never run those because the answer is the same and it’s very boring. It’s just, “Move forward.” The guy I thought I’d kill myself over when I was 27 I can’t remember the name of now. There are some big general categories. One is cubicle land. The horrors of the farters, the breathers, the hummers, the eaters. I can only do a limited number of “My husband looks at porn.”

Lynn: With 'Group Therapy,' because of the nature of the column, I got a lot of emotional etiquette questions. It had a jury effect. A lot of people wrote in about some relationship they had, and both parties were hurt and insulted by something the other had done, and the over arching question was “Which one of us is the asshole here?”

Emily: Another thing I’ve learned from the column is write the damn thank you note! This feeling of “I haven’t been sufficiently acknowledged” is really deep. Read the Bible. Cain and Abel. What was that over? God liked this gift better than that gift. They seem trivial, but they’re big.

Cheryl: That’s funny. I hardly get etiquette or work-related stuff. I get a lot of sex and love questions. There are far more 28-year-old virgins out there then I ever would have imagined.

Emily: Don’t you want to put them together?

Cheryl: Introduce them to each other? Yeah. There are several questions from virgins that stump us. I’ve gotten questions from virgins that ask, “How do you get to the point where you have sex with someone else?” I don’t know how to explain that. I always had the opposite problem, like how do you get to a place where you don’t have sex with someone?It’s funny.

Emily: I agree. There’s something heartbreaking about that. I get a lot of “I’m 25, 27, 28. Everyone says I’m attractive. I have a good job, but no one from the opposite sex has ever touched me.” And you wonder. There are some people who miss the boat in high school and they think there’s some kind of magical thing that happened that they missed. And they get older and older and they’re heading toward becoming a 40-year-old virgin.

Cheryl: Well maybe that’s a part of it. They missed that moment where they were supposed to do that thing. And then now they’re on the other side of it and it becomes an issue. Cary, how have you answered this?

Cary: The introversion/extroversion thing is hard sometimes. Some people are deeply introverted and it’s hard to fathom. As my detractors will be happy to note, I don’t always provide answers. Sometimes I’m just writing a thing. I answer a lot of questions that are unanswerable, because I’m not really answering them. I’m like singing a song. I’m trying to say something comforting.

Emily: I think Cary gets to the heart of what makes each of our columns different. What you describe is very different from what I do. I’ve had people say, “I don’t know how you answered that.” I say I only answer the ones I think I can answer! People are looking at these columns for different things.

by Britt Harvey, Hazlitt |  Read more:

Illustration by Andrew Kolb
[ed. Repost August 25, 2012]

Gabriel García Márquez, Conjurer of Literary Magic, Dies at 87

[ed. See also: The Art of Fiction No.69.]

Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose “One Hundred Years of Solitude” established him as a giant of 20th-century literature, died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87.

Cristóbal Pera, his former editor at Random House, confirmed the death. Mr. García Márquez learned he had lymphatic cancer in 1999, and a brother said in 2012 that he had developed senile dementia.

Mr. García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers — Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway among them — who were embraced both by critics and by a mass audience.

“Each new work of his is received by expectant critics and readers as an event of world importance,” the Swedish Academy of Letters said in awarding him the Nobel.

Mr. García Márquez was a master of the literary genre known as magical realism, in which the miraculous and the real converge. In his novels and stories, storms rage for years, flowers drift from the skies, tyrants survive for centuries, priests levitate and corpses fail to decompose. And, more plausibly, lovers rekindle their passion after a half-century apart.

Magical realism, he said, sprang from Latin America’s history of vicious dictators and romantic revolutionaries, of long years of hunger, illness and violence. In accepting his Nobel, Mr. García Márquez said: “Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination. For our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”

Like many Latin American intellectuals and artists, Mr. García Márquez felt impelled to speak out on the political issues of his day. He viewed the world from a left-wing perspective, bitterly opposing Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the right-wing Chilean dictator, and unswervingly supporting Fidel Castro in Cuba. Mr. Castro became such a close friend that Mr. García Márquez showed him drafts of his unpublished books.

No draft had more impact than the one for “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Mr. García Márquez’s editor began reading it at home one rainy day, and as he read page after page by this unknown Colombian author, his excitement grew. Soon he called the Argentine novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez and summoned him urgently to the home.

Mr. Eloy Martinez remembered entering the foyer with wet shoes and encountering pages strewn across the floor by the editor in his eagerness to read through the work. They were the first pages of a book that in 1967 would vault Mr. García Márquez onto the world stage. He later authorized an English translation, by Gregory Rabassa. In Spanish or English, readers were tantalized from its opening sentences:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col. Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of 20 adobe houses built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” would sell tens of millions of copies. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called it “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since ‘Don Quixote.’ ” The novelist William Kennedy hailed it as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”

Mr. García Márquez was rattled by the praise. He grew to hate “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” he said in interviews, because he feared his subsequent work would not measure up to it in readers’ eyes. He need not have worried. Almost all his 15 other novels and short-story collections were lionized by critics and devoured by readers.

by Jonathan Kandell, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ulf Andersen, AP

Douglas and Stephanie Mallis Kahn
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The Postcapital Economy

Consider John Maynard Keynes’s coalmine experiment. On the theory that having people employed for no purpose at all can help to stimulate economic activity during times of demand collapse or output shock, he proposed having a government fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them in coal mines, and encouraging private enterprise to compete to dig them back up again. The process would employ many more people in jobs, albeit pointless ones, and thereby spread wealth around. Keynes argued it would naturally be more sensible to have these people employed in building houses or something else more useful. But the economic effect would be the same.

In many ways, what White is arguing is that China is actually running the greatest Keynesian coal-mine thought experiment of all time, building and producing not for the sake of what was produced but rather to take advantage of a global capital surplus. This gave China the opportunity to empower its citizens on the condition that underwriting the capital could woo it in the first place through this massive social experiment. It did so, of course, by means of foreign-exchange manipulation—an important precursor to the quantitative easing (QE) used by the U.S. Federal Reserve postcrisis—that ensured that every dollar invested in China would offer a better payoff than a dollar invested at home. It could guarantee this because not only would there always be a superior Chinese bid for the capital in question but it would be coming from the government directly.

It is only because the government is putting up the bid rather than private enterprise—which in emerging markets is thought of as risky and suffering from corruption and other principal-agent problems—that the capital suddenly becomes free-flowing to the country in question. If it wasn’t the government providing the bid, it would be seen as too risky to invest. But since the government can print money ad infinitum, and this is what Chinese currency manipulation really consists of (buying dollars with newly printed yuan), that bid remains competitive for as long as the Chinese government wants it to be.

The Western version of QE sees the Federal Reserve printing money in order to absorb underperforming assets and U.S. Treasury bonds into its coffers in a way that effectively underwrites their performance no matter what and squeezes the market at the same time. The Chinese FX manipulation version of QE saw the government printing money in order to absorb abundant dollars out of the global system, in a way that effectively kept the dollar overvalued no matter what. This meant investors could be sure that their dollar denominated investments in China would always result in real returns.

The reason the Chinese government felt comfortable underwriting bids for foreign investment, meanwhile, is probably because its socialistic disposition allowed it to see what the West couldn’t: namely, that in the West, capital was no longer scarce enough to justify a truly competitive bid for it and all China had to do was provide some sort of guarantee in order to benefit from it.

At the end of the day, the much discussed “savings glut” is just another way of saying capital surplus. For years nobody really understood what was fueling it, but more recently Larry Summers speculated that it was the first clear symptom of “secular stagnation,” a trend that arguably started in the early 1980s. In a secular-stagnated economy, we end up with a capital rather than labor bias, which sees rents and returns flow to owners of capital in favor of labor, to the detriment of the wider economy.

Unless that surplus could be redistributed to new pockets of demand, all roads consequently lead to a demand collapse, because eventually all wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of technology and capital owners rather than in labor’s hands. This creates a vicious demand circle that impoverishes the economy overall.

For China to benefit from that capital surplus, all it needed to do was draw the capital over and keep it there, creating a self-enforcing capital scarcity—or savings glut—for the world. With its socialistically minded economy that didn’t mind investing capital for public purposes regardless of return, China prevented that capital from returning to the West. This is important, because if the capital was allowed to flow back to the West, it would have less of a distributive wealth effect than it would in China, where it would make more people feel more rich. In the West, it would more than likely end up concentrating in the hands of capital owners, who would be ever keener to employ robots than human beings. (...)

As White argues, this is why it’s wrong to assume that China is pursuing capitalism as we know it. Its real aim is to create a hybrid model of public investment and very aggressive market-based competition with the hope of creating consumer surpluses rather than economic rents. This would distribute wealth more widely than if it was passed exclusively to rent seekers alone.

Capital is allocated consequently not on the basis of whether the asset created can provide a return but whether it serves a greater social purpose. The Chinese government will consequently fund contractors to develop public infrastructure and other massive social projects, as well as backstop private enterprise that has potentially overinvested in private developments. Even if the projects don’t yield a monetary return, they improve the social infrastructure, Chinese mobility, and the general standard of life. By contrast, in the United States, the lack of guaranteed returns has created a major underinvestment problem in public infrastructure, which is now falling apart or becoming ever more dangerous as a result.

by Izabella Kaminska, TNI |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Irony is Ruining Our Culture

[ed. The prevalence of irony may also be an expression of generalized helplessness/hopelessness, which, I guess, is at least a positive in that it implies an awareness and perhaps yearning for something more authentic. It's better than what comes after: cynicism (followed by resignation and/or despair).]

Percy Shelley famously wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” For Shelley, great art had the potential to make a new world through the depth of its vision and the properties of its creation. Today, Shelley would be laughed out of the room. Lazy cynicism has replaced thoughtful conviction as the mark of an educated worldview. Indeed, cynicism saturates popular culture, and it has afflicted contemporary art by way of postmodernism and irony. Perhaps no recent figure dealt with this problem more explicitly than David Foster Wallace. One of his central artistic projects remains a vital question for artists today: How does art progress from irony and cynicism to something sincere and redeeming?

Twenty years ago, Wallace wrote about the impact of television on U.S. fiction. He focused on the effects of irony as it transferred from one medium to the other. In the 1960s, writers like Thomas Pynchon had successfully used irony and pop reference to reveal the dark side of war and American culture. Irony laid waste to corruption and hypocrisy. In the aftermath of the ’60s, as Wallace saw it, television adopted a self-deprecating, ironic attitude to make viewers feel smarter than the naïve public, and to flatter them into continued watching. Fiction responded by simply absorbing pop culture to “help create a mood of irony and irreverence, to make us uneasy and so ‘comment’ on the vapidity of U.S. culture, and most important, these days, to be just plain realistic.” But what if irony leads to a sinkhole of relativism and disavowal? (...)

Recently, the Onion spoofed an ad campaign in which Applebee’s encouraged hipsters to visit their restaurants “ironically” and middle-aged adults to make fun of hipsters. The parody describes four “with it” young folks “seriously” eating their dinner at Applebee’s while ridiculing the food, service and atmosphere. Behind them sit three sad, middle-aged adults mocking the hipsters, sarcastically saying “because I know who the latest bands are I am too cool to eat a cheeseburger without making fun of it.” Neither group is genuinely happy about their meal or station in life. The Onion’s satire points out that irony and formality have become the same thing. At one time, irony served to reveal hypocrisies, but now it simply acknowledges one’s cultural compliance and familiarity with pop trends. The art of irony has lost its vision and its edge. The rebellious posture of the past has been annexed by the very commercialism it sought to defy.

by Matt Ashby and Brendan Carroll, Salon |  Read more:

Image: Hachette Book Group

How Legalized Pot Would Change America

When Washington State needed advice on how to set up a market for legal marijuana, they called UCLA professor Mark Kleiman. Here, Kleiman discusses the future of legalized pot with Ezra Klein.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mark Kleiman: Continued prohibition is probably the worst thing we could do about cannabis right now. Alcohol style legalization, which is where we're headed, is probably the second worse. If we had a national debate now we might settle on a temperate cannabis policy. That would get us the benefits of legalization without an upsurge in heavy use and use by juveniles.

Without a national solution – a national framework for safe cannabis policy – we're going to wind up going down the road we went down with alcohol. We'll have commercial sale, low taxes, loose regulation. That's a bad place to be for alcohol. It's not as bad a place to be for cannabis, but it's the worse place we could be.

Ezra Klein: Why is it a dumb idea to regulate Cannabis in the states?

Mark: A lot of the things you might want to do as a state government you can't do while it remains federally illegal. Each state is hostage to all the other states. If Washington wanted to have tight restrictions and high taxes and Oregon wanted to have loose restrictions and low taxes, guess what happens? Lots of Oregon pot floods Washington.

We'll get a race to the bottom. With tobacco, now New York State and particularly New York City have very high tobacco taxes. But something like a third of all the cigarettes sold in New York City are smuggled. Not from Leningrad, but from Virginia. It's really hard to stop that stuff.

An ounce of cannabis on the illicit market or in the medical stores now costs around $300. A pack of cigarettes can easily weigh just about one ounce. New York City and state are trying to collect $8.00 on a pack of cigarettes and substantially failing. So now try to collect $300.00 on an ounce of cannabis.

I think burning plant leaves and flowers and breathing the smoke is going to be completely out of fashion in ten years along with burning tobacco leaves.

I think we're going to go entirely e-cigarette for both markets. One of the consequences is that's much easier to smuggle because concentrate is much more compact than herbal cannabis. Collecting state level taxes on this may be really hard if there's any substantial state gradients. It's a little weird to be giving state licenses to commit federal felonies. It will be nice to have a legally sane system. (...)

Ezra: Why do you think cannabis concentrate is going to become so dominant in ten years? I'm curious about that.

Mark: A number of reasons. Most people don't like to cough.

Ezra: We should say concentrate is when you've essentially extracted the active ingredient.

Mark: There are a number of different technologies for taking cannabis flowers and leave sand extracting from them the active agents. Not just the THC but the 90 other chemicals that are in there. Then it's put in a variety of forms. There's a liquid form that can go into something like an e-cigarette. There's also a solid, sort of waxy form that can go into a different kind of vaporizer.

In any case you've got some device that applies external heat to the concentrate and you breathe the vapor as opposed to the current technology which is you burn the plant matrix in order to vaporize the active agent and breath the smoke. Well, come on guys, breathing smoke's not a good idea and it's no fun. I think people, particularly people who only use it occasionally, will pay extra not to cough. The more advanced vaporization devices will actually deliver a measured puff which a joint really can't or a pipe really can't.

If you had a measured puff of a tested concentrate you could actually know how many milligrams you're getting to your brain. You could actually control your cannabis use in a halfway reasonable way as much as you can control your drinking experience by having some number of drinks. If you have three drinks, you know what that does to you. You can't really know that with cannabis now. The product is too different. The smoking behaviors is too different. It's not really reproducible. I think concentrates will take care of that.

by Ezra Klein, Vox |  Read more:

Image: Kevin Cummins / Getty Images

Portland: Don't Pee in the Pool

Portland officials said Wednesday they are flushing away millions of gallons of treated water for the second time in less than three years because someone urinated into a city reservoir.

In June 2011, the city drained a 7.5m-gallon reservoir at Mount Tabor in southeast Portland. This time, 38m gallons from a different reservoir at the same location will be discarded after a 19-year-old was videotaped in the act.

"The basic commandment of the Water Bureau is to provide clean, cold and constant water to its customers," bureau administrator David Shaff said Wednesday. "And the premise behind that is we don't have pee in it."

The open reservoirs hold water that has already been treated and goes directly into mains for distribution to customers.

The urine poses little risk – animals routinely deposit waste without creating a public health crisis – but Shaff said he doesn't want to serve water that was deliberately tainted.

"There is at least a perceived difference from my perspective," Shaff said. "I could be wrong on that, but the reality is our customers don't anticipate drinking water that's been contaminated by some yahoo who decided to pee into a reservoir."

by AP/The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: uncredited